Heart of Steel

He tilted his head slightly.

“You... consider me a mad scientist?”

She flushed, dropping her soup spoon back into the bowl with a small
splish
. “I’m—I’m sorry—” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to offend—”

He enfolded her hand between both of his own, and she fell silent immediately, staring at his hands.

“It’s all right,” he said gently. “It’s as accurate a term as any, really.” He glanced at their hands, his cardiac pump skipping a cycle, and then back up at her face. “I will concede that by most baseline standards, I’m quite insane. Mad as a bag of cats, really. I would have to be, to want to take over the world—and I think that frees me from a lot of the constraints of other men of science. I can… imagine the world I want, and the means to accomplish what must seem like a ludicrously lofty goal.”

Her gaze flicked from their hands to his face; her expression was a mask of tightly controlled unease.

“But,” she said, “why do you want to take over the world?”

He stroked her fingers, trying to soothe her anxiety. “I want what I think most people want—a better world. A better place for people to live and work and thrive. I want people who are sick to be able to get cured, without worrying about the cost of the treatment. I want doctors—people like you—to be able to do their jobs without having to answer to a board of bankers who worry more about finances than medicine. I—” His throat suddenly closed, choking off his next words, though he couldn’t say exactly why. Something about that last statement had sent a spike of ice down the back of his neck.

OTHER WORKS BY ELIZABETH EINSPANIER:

             
Sheep’s Clothing

Heart of

STEEL

by

Elizabeth Einspanier

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental, no matter how awesome that would be.

Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Einspanier

Cover designed by Ellie Bockert Augsberger of Creative Digital Studios

Yellow Tulips Isolated © ksena32 / Dollar Photo Club

Robot Holding Money © zentilia / Dollar Photo Club

Edited by: Heather Sowalla at Windy Hills Editing

Proofreading: Julia Gibbs

Chapter

ONE

It all started Thursday morning. Julia was on a small boat with her boyfriend, Jim Thompson, under the sort of humid, baking heat that one only gets in the South Pacific on the cusp of the rainy season. They were bound for a new dive site that Jim had discovered. A gentle wind had been blowing all day, tousling her shoulder-length blonde hair and carrying the salty tang of the ocean to her nostrils. Ordinarily she would be enjoying the scenery. All around her the smooth, deep blue water stretched away in all directions like colored glass, reflecting the nearly-cloudless sky above. In the distance little spits of land dotted the horizon, quietly reminding her how far away she was from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

She wasn’t looking forward to this dive, however, and not just because the choppy water had

left her a bit seasick. She was also trying to think of ways to tell Jim that she wanted to break up with him, a discussion that she knew wouldn’t end well, no matter her approach.

Julia had considered the possibility of breaking up with Jim so many times that she had lost count, and as the two of them got into their respective scuba gear and weight belts she finally settled on dropping the bomb on him when they got home to San Francisco. After all, it wouldn’t do to ruin their vacation and have four more days of awkwardness and fighting—during which time he’d no doubt try to convince her that she didn’t really mean it.

“This is gonna be great!” Jim gushed as he smeared saliva on the inside of his scuba mask, “You’ll love the scenery down there!”

She loved the scenery on the surface, too, though, and as she scanned the horizon one last time before they were due to take the plunge, her eye fell on a shape maybe half a mile away: a low island, its base obscured by jungle, from which the flattened peak of a dormant volcano reared up like the fist of a vengeful deity. In the water she saw indistinct outlines forming broken rings like parentheses around the island.

“Hey Jim, what’s that?” she asked, pointing.

He looked in the indicated direction and grinned. “That’s where we’ll be swimming—Shark Reef Isle.”

“Shark Reef Isle? That sounds like something out of a bad horror movie.”

Jim laughed. “Nah. Nothing like that. I’ve been around here a dozen times. The sharks here are pretty small, and they’re not aggressive at all unless you do something stupid like chum the water.”

A cold spike of fear shot down Julia’s spine. “No
way
am I swimming with sharks!”

His head snapped over before she’d even finished her  sentence,  giving  her 
that
  look, the one that told

her she’d misstepped. The smile was still there, but it had left his eyes. Silence descended between them like an anvil, and stayed for a full minute. She squirmed uncomfortably under that smile; it made her feel like a dull-witted child who’d done something wrong, and a tight knot of anxiety slowly congealed in her stomach. She shrank into herself and dropped her gaze, hoping desperately that he would just
say something
already. It was like waiting for Darth Vader to decide whether or not to Force-choke her.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said evenly, “That after I went through all the trouble—
and expense
—to book us a trip to Hawaii—a vacation that
you
desperately needed, by the way—”

“Jim, I—” she started, but he continued speaking over her.

“—that you’re not going to let me have this
one
thing that I want?”

She bit her lip. He wasn’t calling her selfish, in so many words—he never did—but it was the
tone
he had, like he was scolding a small child for wanting another cookie before dinner. The theme was all too familiar to her, but it wouldn’t do her any good to argue the point—she had been placed on paid leave from the hospital after...

She shook her head, her hand wandering up to touch her throat, remembering the sensation of a scalpel’s blade pressed against her carotid artery. The nightmares had only recently eased, but even the thought of working the night shift again made her throat close up. She took slow, deliberate breaths, a technique her counselor had taught her to head off the panic attacks. It was better not to think about the inci-

dent. She knew that freaking out now would only prove Jim’s point. That, along with arguing with Jim, or saying she wanted to break up with him, would require her to commit the mortal sin of
ruining their vacation
.

“Come on,” he continued. “You make decisions with people’s lives every day. Take a risk with your own once in a while.” He grinned. “Besides, I was kidding about the sharks. Haven’t seen a damn one there.” He sounded distinctly disappointed. “Now, we are going to have a good time on this dive,
right
?”

And there was that
tone
that he used to ask the sort of questions that, in his mind, had only one correct answer.

She sighed. “Right,” she whispered.

Julia studied the island and surrounding reefs at length, trying to decide whether Jim had been truly kidding about the sharks. Jim held the philosophy that only by risking one’s life did one really live... but it wasn’t like he would risk
her
life, would he?

“Can we get any closer?” Julia asked the boat’s captain, a mustachioed South Pacific islander whose name escaped her.

He shook his head. “No can do. That place is haunted. This is as close as we get.”

“Haunted?” Julia asked. “Haunted by what?”

“The usual,” Jim said, laughing. “Monsters, demons, ghosts, that sort of thing. They say this place has some sort of a crazy volcano god or whatever that makes monsters. The only thing I’ve ever seen around are crabs and shoals of fish, so I think you’re safe.”

“So… you
have
been here before, right?” Julia peered at the island in the distance. She’d never heard of Shark Reef Isle, and she was pretty sure he would have mentioned it to her before this.

“A couple of times,” Jim assured her. “Trust me—if I’d seen any sea monsters here I’d have pics all over the internet by now.”

Julia relaxed, but only marginally. The South Pacific was still well-known for its sharks and stingrays.

“Two hours, Mr. Jim,” Captain Mustache said. “Then we go. Don’t you be late.”

“Come on,” Jim replied, in the sort of tone that implied that this was a long-standing disagreement between them. “I’m never late—you know that.”

Captain Mustache nodded seriously but said nothing further.

And that was Jim, Julia thought. Jim the daredevil. He wasn’t foolhardy, but he was an adrenaline junkie. And while he collected local legends like children used to collect Pokémon cards, he had long made it clear that he considered them entertaining stories—nothing more.

The plan was to swim around the reefs for a bit and come back in an hour—long before Captain Mustache planned to leave. There was plenty of air in the tanks for that long of a swim, and it would give them a chance to experience nature. Hopefully it wouldn’t be the sort of nature with big teeth that wanted to eat them.

The pair of them tipped backwards into the water from the edge of the boat, clutching their diving masks to keep them in place, and plunged into the blue water surrounding Shark Reef Isle.

Julia felt weightless in the water, as though cradled by a pleasantly cool hand. To her delight, the sun had managed to heat the water just enough above bone-cold to offer reprieve from the afternoon heat. She  thought  back  to  her  father teaching her how to

swim, supporting her near the surface while she paddled and splashed. This was so much different, like being a mermaid exploring the reefs, dangerously beautiful coral formations in reds, blues, and purples, where fish darted and swam looking for food or hiding from these strange bubbling monsters that swam overhead. Jim tapped her on the arm and pointed to a shimmering school of fish undulating past. She nodded and gave him an okay sign, indicating that she saw them. God, everything was so beautiful and otherworldly down here. She almost wished she could grow gills so she could live down here forever. Then she wouldn’t have to deal with relationship drama on the surface.

The pair of them swam some distance from the diving boat, collecting a few uninhabited shells but mainly leaving things alone. Jim took a few pictures with a waterproof camera, and then had Julia pose so he could take a picture of her in the water. She trod water as he held the camera up to his eye, when she caught a dark shape moving behind him, lithe and torpedo-like. Then it turned and she saw the lipless gash of its mouth, filled with serrated teeth. It turned again and made a beeline for the two of them. In some strangely disconnected part of her brain, she noticed that it had a scar across its nose, as though someone had attacked it with a knife.

Shark!

She pointed frantically behind him, making muffled noises around her regulator. He lowered the camera, looking at her first in puzzlement, then in alarm. He turned just in time for the shark to barrel into him, knocking the camera away. The creature continued on its course, plowing into her as well, knocking her regulator out of her mouth.

She had no time to find it and get it back—her half-lungful of air wouldn’t last that long. Her only option was the surface. She glanced around, trying to get her bearings. The impact had stirred up a cloud of brick-red debris and bubbles, obscuring her vision. She forced herself to relax, and followed the bubbles as they inevitably veered upwards, heading for the surface. She tried not to think of how much the cloud of debris resembled blood.

A white, leathery, webbed hand grasped her left ankle, pulling her back down into the murk. She looked down, instinctively kicking at the hand. Were the stories of sea monsters here true? As her mind spun in the hamster-wheel of panic—a really
bad
idea right now, she knew—the hand yanked her down, jolting another breath from her lungs. She could now identify the owner of the hand, a creature with the head of a shark—and a familiar-looking scar on its snout. It surged upwards, fang-rimmed jaws gaping. In her terror and panic, time slowed down. Her lungs burned, and her vision was starting to go gray from oxygen deprivation.

The shark-thing pulled at her ankle again, reaching up at her with its free hand. She felt a burst of white-hot agony in her left knee, and then everything went black.

***

When Dr. Alistair Mechanus woke that morning, the last thing on his mind was that he would have visitors.

In fact, he hadn’t had many visitors in the ten years  he’d  resided  in  the labyrinthine lair he’d built

deep within the dormant volcano that dominated Shark Reef Isle, thanks to the carefully-crafted rumors he’d spread about monsters to keep people away. Even so, he knew he could make new friends easily—given the right combination of tissues, genetic codes, or mechanical parts—and so was never lonely. Certain closed-minded individuals might have called his friends
minions
, but they were all ever so helpful in the pursuit of his hobby.

After all, world conquest wasn’t a
bad
pursuit for a man of his genius, was it? Most people would agree that the world needed improvement, and by golly, he was the man to do that. By now, he’d invested too much into this to even consider failure an option, so it made sense to be vigilant in the care and maintenance of his little army. He had detailed files on everything that he would require, from attack plans to diplomatic openings to individuals he deemed to be most or least expendable once the revolution came.

Currently, he was repairing one of his maintenance robots, moving back and forth rapidly and smoothly on the metal legs that he’d had in some form or another for as long as he could remember, while reviewing the internal schematics of the machine within the viewpoint of his mechanical left eye. The laboratory in which he worked, like every laboratory in the complex, had everything he needed for the repairs, from tools that he’d designed and amassed himself to a small army of utility pincers on slender appendages installed in the ceiling that he could control with a thought. He selected one of several esoteric-looking tools and briefly twirled it between the gloved fingers of his right hand before unscrewing the robot’s access panel. In the square o-

pening he saw the cubical power core had blown out, leaving its center dark and dull.

His metal left hand—its movements as organically smooth as its flesh-and-blood counterpart—reached in and pulled the power crystal free of its housing. To his satisfaction, it came out smoothly—he’d initially feared that it had fused to the socket—but it was hot enough that it would have badly burned his other hand, even through his thick gloves.

He held up the burned-out core in one hand and the upturned palm of the other hand; one mechanical arm delicately picked up the bad core and took it away, while another mechanical arm dropped a fresh replacement into his other hand.